Tea Party Triumps!

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Trumps Presidency started for him long ago. He told People Magazine in 1998:

“If I were to run, I’d run as a Republican. They’re the dumbest group of voters in the country. They believe anything on Fox News. I could lie and they’d still eat it up. I bet my numbers would be terrific.”

The Tea Party revolt in the Republican Party began 11 years later, after Barack Obama became President. Their throngs first marched on Washington that very year of 2009. I remember going to see them on the Mall in March and wondering. By 2014 they took down one of the top establishment Republican officials who was on his way to being Speaker of the House, Eric Cantor of Virginia. Now in 2016 they have triumped, soon to own the White House as well as both branches of Congress, and thus positioning themselves to take the Supreme Court.

References to the Tea Party haven’t been made this year. After all only about 10% of Americans ever identified with it. Yet it was the tip of the speak and in just a few years their protest movement not just against Obama and the Dems but against the establishment of their own party has prevailed Billionaire hustler mogul — himself a kind of snake-oil-salesman in the age of cable TV and twitter — became their unlikely champion. The Donald starting plotting for Tuesday’s unequaled political earthquake even before 1998 as the recent PBS Frontline special so well documents.

Now all Americans, and indeed the world, have to adjust to being led by the Tea Partiers aligned with the most militant, no-nothing, America-first elements of U.S. society, and led by a man who ticks off all the boxes as an extreme psychopath and narcissist. I’ll say it again. Think Germany 1933…as imperfect as the historical metaphor is because we truly are in a new age and a new world and a new even more fractured and dangerous country.